


The Devil's Water

by oxymoronic



Category: Incredible Hulk (2008), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Backstory, Headcanon, M/M, Post Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-15
Updated: 2012-05-15
Packaged: 2017-11-05 11:06:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/405713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oxymoronic/pseuds/oxymoronic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Blonsky!Moran. Sebastian has always known that the universe owes him something more.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Devil's Water

**Author's Note:**

> Born when a friend of mine decided that Tim Roth would make for a nice Moran; naturally, this evolved into him actually becoming Moran, and this fic is me crystallising that particular headcanon. I play merry havoc with time-spans in both _Sherlock_ and _The Incredible Hulk_ to make it work.
> 
> Much of the later dialogue is lifted directly from _The Incredible Hulk_ , so claiming no possession there. I should also point out that the whole "Sebastian ringing Jim in _Reichenbach_ " was not actually my idea, and is lifted from [this post](http://tuulikki.tumblr.com/post/22706753736/upsetting-mormor-headcanon-is-upsetting) bouncing around Tumblr.
> 
> Title lifted from _When You Were Young_ by The Killers.

When Sebastian is five, there is a fight in the playground. One boy holds another aloft in the air with nothing but his mind, his soft, butter-yellow eyes turned a sharp, bright white. The teachers hang back, repulsed and full of fear, but the canny, hard-eyed headmistress whacks the latter about the head and catches the former deftly when he plummets to the ground.

Something unfurls in Sebastian’s mind that day, catches him tight about the throat; something small, bright, and dangerous, something that will never truly leave him. He knows, from that day on, that he is destined for a greater purpose, and it is only a matter of time before it unlocks from where it lies inside of him.

 

 

 

Sebastian’s six, seven, eight, and he’s staring at a can across the room until his eyes ache with the burn of it. Nine, ten, eleven, and Sebastian’s eyes are closed as he tries instead to open his mind, to delve into thoughts and fears. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen, and he’s trying to rip the world at its seams, tear down buildings and shred apart the sky with the rage that sits hard and heavy in the crux of his chest.

Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, and Sebastian’s stepped in front of a bus, jumped from a speeding train, thrown himself from a plane at fifteen thousand feet and almost, _almost_ not pulled the cord. He has nothing but a snapped collarbone and extensive organ failure to show for it.

When Sebastian is eighteen years old, he realises that he is nothing but normal.

 

 

 

But he’s clever; cleverer than most, and the raft of exams he jumps through with ease is evidence of that. His teachers say he should aim high, higher than his friends and family and most of those he knows, and something in his chest flushes with insurmountable pride.

Oxford lasts four terms. He loves it, at first; the quiet, reverent praise he receives from friend and family alike, the small, bustling little city with its tall, locked doors that he’s allowed to enter. But this importance is an illusion; his tutors pay him no regard, and his classmates regard him as their equal. He’s small, he’s inconsequential, he’s replaceable in a world of far cleverer men.

 

 

 

When at first he joins the army, he is the most insignificant of men; he’s weedy, ratty, troublesome, weak. But strength is something he can build, something he can mould, something he has the bare bones of that he can lash the muscle to; and build it he does, over hours and days and weeks, weeks and months and years. Someone recommends sharp-shooting to him as the perfect combination of body and mind, and he takes to it effortlessly, finds he has the eye for it, finds it as easy as breathing.

And when the war begins, he is useful; there is nothing more required of him than strength and courage, and he has as much of that as they require. There is something of the beauty of the fight that catches hold of him, too; something he falls in love with in between the terrifying, high-pulsed, adrenaline-shocked days, something he finds he enjoys as he levels each opponent with dismally pathetic ease.

The only trouble now is that Sebastian finds himself bored and itching for the fight.

 

 

 

He makes good friends with the R&D team when he’s not in the field; their head of operations at his base is one Adrien Hanway, an old friend from Oxford with a sharp, brilliant mind. He offers himself as their lab rat, and in return he’s handling some of the finest weaponry he can within the blink of an eye.

“The sights on this are shit,” he says as he drops their latest offering back on the black matte worktop, untying the now-empty ammo harness clamped across his chest. “Better than the last one, but still shit.”

The man he’s speaking to – Jack Hawthorn, a usual sight mid-morning on a Saturday – looks up at him with a wry smile. “Nice to know we’re aiming in the right direction.” He runs his fingers along the barrel of the gun, his eyes sharp and his touch deliberate and calculating. “How did she handle?”

“Perfectly,” Sebastian says, and the grin Jack gives him in return is thoroughly indecent. “I hear the recent Stark batch is pretty reasonable,” he adds with deliberately feigned nonchalance and a raised eyebrow.

Jack throws him a look. “The day the British government can afford to give us Stark tech is the day we win this fucking war,” he mutters, and Sebastian snorts. Jack raises a hand. “I do, however, have something I _definitely shouldn’t show you_ in a crate in the office back there,” he continues, and then chuckles loudly at the look Sebastian must have plastered on his face. “Jesus, how could I resist those eyes?” he deadpans, already pacing over to the back door.

Sebastian kills an afternoon with their latest present from Stark, which is everything he’s ever wanted; small, smooth, quiet and precise. Sebastian doesn’t need it to be deadly or ruthless; when faced with an occupied block of flats he’d much rather have a sniper’s rifle in his hand than a bazooka, much rather let his hand and mind do the work than what lies in front of him. He pushes himself until he’s trembling and sweaty, until his head is made sluggish and thick with ache, until the air is choked with the smell of cordite; then he showers, packs up, and heads back to Jack, his blood still pulsing a low, hot roar in every artery and vein.

“You took your time,” Jack says as he enters the room, sprawled over his paperwork and with a tired look in his eyes. Sebastian smiles, but says nothing, choosing to work his way through the workshop and drop the Stark tech back in the crate it came in.

“Any chance of me taking one of these into the field sometime?” he asks as he lays it back into its Styrofoam frame, and a bundle of documents in a grey file laying at its side snags his attention. He frowns slightly; he doesn’t recognise the logo stamped across the top-right. An eagle, with legs and wings spread.

“If you’ve got a spare $1.5m kicking around, then yeah,” Jack calls through at him, and Sebastian lets a low, long whistle hiss out through his teeth; Jack chuckles in reply. Glancing back through at the open doorway, he reaches down and knocks open the file, skimming his eye down the first page. It’s a mission report of some kind, dated to the mid-forties; he reaches for the next one, and finds himself confronted with two old, greying pictures labelled _before_ and _after_ of a handsome, blond man with kindly eyes and a small smile. Steve Rogers, the caption tells him, exposed to an enhancing serum of unknown components that transformed him from normality to perfection.

“The fuck, Sebastian?” Jack says from over his shoulder, much closer than he’d realised – some fucking SAS-trained soldier he is, with Jack fucking Hawthorn getting the drop on him. Jack slams the file shut with one hand as he pushes Sebastian back with the other, and it surprises Sebastian to see him so obviously shaken. “That’s something you definitely can’t see,” he says, a tremor in his voice and fear in his eyes. He scours his face with both hands; his shoulders are shaking. “Christ, Sebastian, I’d thank them if I got fired over this.”

“I won’t say a word,” he replies, hands spread in the air before him, but Jack already has the eyes of a dead man.

 

 

 

He is dishonourably discharged the following morning, at the age of twenty-nine. He never sees Jack again.

 

 

 

For a while he lets himself fall into apathy, and his life dissolves into sitting in a smoke-filled room with the curtains drawn against the sunlight and the silence throttled by the unamusing sounds of daytime television; then something in his mind breathes, something changes, and he’s scraping together his half-used funds and buying himself weapons and gear and putting himself under the employ of far from virtuous people. His government has made it quite clear that he is never to be allowed such power, such information, and Sebastian has firmly decided that he disagrees with their decision. If he has to get to it by less legitimate means, he’s fully confident he has the required skillset to make it so.

He works freelance for a handful of years, pushing him from his third decade into his fourth. He likes to think he builds himself a reputation of sorts, hopes he is known for his efficiency, and allows it to bring him clients for the first few years; and then he gets himself a handler by the name of Marie who fields his calls and clears him down from the majority of the gutter-work. By year three he’s moved out of his shitty flat in Dulwich and he’s worked four jobs on a governmental level, inching slowly towards his goal.

At the dawn of year six, on the 2nd of January, when Sebastian is thirty-five years old, he unlocks his front door to find Jim Moriarty standing in his living room. He remembers, quite clearly, looking the man up and down and thinking that this one has a flair for the dramatic.

Sebastian ignores him, crossing to the kitchen and stacking his shopping up in the fridge and on the shelves. Jim haunts the doorway behind him, his quick eyes tracking Sebastian’s every move, and something about the press of that gaze sets his teeth on edge. “My office hours are weekdays only, nine to five,” he says dryly as he flicks on the kettle, fishing a mug out from the back of the cupboard. “Tea?”

Jim pauses for a moment, his black eyes cool; and then something in him warms a little, much to Sebastian’s surprise. “Please,” Jim replies.

They drink in silence in Sebastian’s living room, warm and comfortable and furnished eclectically with items bought from the profits of Sebastian’s last few years of work. Jim doesn’t watch him; neither does he scour the room, a single pointed eyebrow raised at the belongings Sebastian has chosen for himself. He sits back in his chair and drinks his ill-brewed tea from Sebastian’s cheap and chipped mug with an air of quiet contentment, and Sebastian will not remember this for many years to come.

“You’re here for a job, I presume,” he continues when he’s done, setting his mug down on the table at his side, entirely ignoring the coaster he’d once placed there in a moment of hopeful madness. “I’m backed up for the next few weeks in Budapest, but nothing more.”

“More of a permanent arrangement,” Jim replies, tongue darting out across thin lips as he idly picks at a perfect nail. “I suppose you can still live here, if you must. The pay will be good, and you can get rid of that tiresome agreement with _Marie Foster_ of all people.”

Sebastian raises an eyebrow. “I like Marie,” he counters, and he treasures the look of surprise that flashes briefly on Jim’s face; not, he thinks, a man that’s used to disagreement. He picks up his mug, and gets to his feet. “Thanks, but no thanks. You could give me the crown jewels and I still wouldn’t be able to buy what I want.”

“I know what you want,” Jim says softly, his eyes flicking up to watch him, cold, hard and dark.

Sebastian’s blood turns cold. “You can give me Rogers?” he asks quietly.

Jim’s smile sharpens instantly. “I can make you like him,” he replies, and from that moment on Jim Moriarty owns him.

 

 

 

It’s years before Jim even tells him what he knows, never mind shows him; and yet Sebastian finds somehow that he doesn’t mind. Jim takes him, takes the bare bones of what he is and crafts him, hones and sharpens his every facet until he finds it almost laughable how weak he was before. Sebastian has always looked for the most demanding of fights, to unlock what it is he still sometimes believes lives within him; and Jim has no end of victims to supply, and each is more challenging than the last.

Further still, the man sets him on the road to a greater purpose. Most of the men and women Sebastian has worked for have seen him as nothing more than a hand at the end of their arm, the extension of their own will; but Jim informs him of the greater plan, tells him who he hunts and why they must sit at the barrel of Sebastian’s gun. His education is hardly formulaic; they don’t have _briefings_ and _debriefings_ , and it is most definitely not universal; he sometimes has Sebastian kill a man with no reason given at all. Other times, he will ring Sebastian late at night and Sebastian will make the trip to Jim’s house and be sat down in front of a family tree, a sprawling, annotated map, a sheaf of typed documents and have whole worlds revealed before his eyes.

Later, Sebastian will realise the potential Jim has given him to carry on without him, but that is many years to come.

 

 

 

Jim tells him nothing of Sherlock Holmes. He first learns of him on one of the more frequent times he is at Jim’s until night segues into morning; often, they dispense of the formality of sending him home at all. He sights a photograph of the man as he sets a sandwich down beside Jim, and finds he takes an instant dislike to him. “Who’s this? My next target?”

“Someday, maybe,” Jim replies, eyes locked on his screen. “We’re playing the long game with this one, darling.” He glances over distastefully at the sandwich beside him. “What’s this?”

“Food,” Sebastian replies, pulling the photo closer and memorising the face in a handful of blinks. “You haven’t eaten today.” Jim hums in reply, eyes still on the odd, black screen in front of him; flashes of text dart across it, and the flickering sign in the top-right places his conversation partner in Porto Verde, Brazil. “Mr. Green?”

Jim’s mouth twists in a smile. “I know. He probably thinks it’s witty,” he says, and Sebastian has no fucking clue what he’s on about – but that’s hardly uncommon. “His real name is Banner. Bruce Banner.” He plugs a final, rapid message into the computer ( _can’t help if you won’t let me_ ), and this Banner disconnects; Jim shuts the laptop lid and glances up at him. “He was working on replicating the Rogers serum,” he adds, and Sebastian’s mouth goes dry.

“Any success?” he asks, and Jim seems to find this funny, but will give him no reply.

 

 

 

Something in Jim seems to change, then; something so small and uncertain Sebastian doesn’t notice it go, but spots it once it’s missing nonetheless. He ties it incontrovertibly to Sherlock Holmes, because as much as Jim Moriarty has a brilliant mind there is something in him that is human too, and Sebastian is a canny enough man to spot cause and effect.

It begins with changing his ringtone and ends with him stepping into a poorly-lit swimming pool to face the man himself. Sebastian squats in the arena above him, his team with their sights trained onto the men beneath him and his heart pounding at a rough, dull roar as Jim is suddenly, undeniably in the line of fire – and no level of bulletproof jacket (that Sebastian cajoled him into earlier), no highly-trained assassin squatting in the rafters (that Jim had insisted he wouldn’t actually need) will be able to protect him if those explosives are ignited.

He stays calm and steady until Jim is in the car, until Jim is home, and then he’s got the small, vicious little man up against the wall with a forearm trapping his wrists above his head and the other clenched in the material around his gut. “Never again,” he hisses, his voice alive with malice but a hot, thick fear twisting and warping his words. “You will never meet that man again. Do you understand me?” he says, and the unfamiliar shock that assaults Jim’s face will live with him for years to come.

 

 

 

For a while, Jim improves, as if happier now knowing he plays a greater game; but in a way he is worse, too, his black moods always blacker, his moments of long, unsettling silence always stretching longer and longer until he will not speak or eat for days. Fear gnaws through Sebastian, and as much as he tells himself the man is fine, the man is working, he knows that he is not.

He finds Jim with his head in his hands one Friday night, a cold cup of tea at his side and the familiar laptop screen propped open by his face, skin ghostly-white in the half-light, the area below his eyes rough and bruised from insomnia. Sebastian places a hand on either shoulder, runs them slow and steady down his spine; and it warms him even now the way that Jim leans back against his fingers.

Jim chuckles slightly; and it’s almost kindly, almost sane, a far cry from the sounds he has heard from his mouth before. “I fear this Holmes might be the death of me,” he says softly after a long, quiet pause, tone lilted in amusement and maybe a little surprise.

Sebastian can’t quite bite back the growl. “I won’t let him,” he says, before he can stop himself from speaking; “I’ll rip his lungs out through his throat before he touches you.”

Jim turns in his chair and looks at him, and his black eyes are almost warm. “I know.”

 

 

 

Sebastian is thirty-nine when Jim has him enter what he calls _the final act_ ; and let it be noted that Sebastian thought him melodramatic from the beginning. It is one of the rarer occasions when Sebastian is not aware of the entire overture; these days, he is usually involved in everything in one respect or another, but with Holmes – and with Mr. Green – Jim still keeps secrets from him. “Outside the hospital,” Jim says, paused on the doorstep in unfamiliar clothing, a bag slung over his shoulder and his hair no longer slicked back; he looks almost alien, and that is, after all, the idea. “Keep your eye on the good Doctor until he takes the fall.”

 _Stay safe_ , Sebastian wants to say; _stay home_. But he nods, and touches his arm, and Jim steps wordlessly out into the street beyond.

Sebastian is in position before the squirming of his gut betrays the combat-ready calmness of his mind. He can’t see Jim from here; doesn’t even know for certain he’s on the rooftop, doesn’t even know whether he’s still breathing. Once he has himself set up he pulls his mobile from his pocket and rings the only number it knows. He imagines the wretched, tinny ringtone filtering into the London skyline; but he can’t hear it from here. The phone rings, and rings, and then _welcome to Orange answer phone_ and Sebastian disconnects the call.

 

 

 

A day passes, and then Sebastian sits alone and unobserved on Jim Moriarty’s bed. He’d spent the night at a safehouse, as arranged; but the rendezvous arranged here had been a farce to say the least. He still has flecks of blood on the toes of his shoes from where it had leaked further than he’d thought it would, from where he’d stood with his knees locked and his mind blank, unable to move. He feels as if he ought to want to claw out Holmes’ eyes with his fingernails, peel away his skin with nails and teeth – but really he feels adrift. He is purposeless once more, and this time it hurts, like a huge, gaping maw has opened up beneath his feet. He feels as if he’s eighteen years old again, realising there is nothing locked away in him at all.

Sebastian sits with his head in his hands, and the backs of his eyes are full of Jim’s lies and his slack, bloodied, unseeing face. He had seen the signs; he should have known them for what they really were.

An odd, unfamiliar ringtone fills the air, and Sebastian’s staring across the room in utter incomprehension before remembering his old mobile’s still inside his jacket pocket. He lets it ring out once, twice, three times before he drags himself into motion and catches it before the voicemail.

“Yes?”

 _“I have a job for you,”_ the voice says, and it’s female; Marie. Jim had never liked her; but Sebastian had spent six years of his life honing his aliases, building his own empire founded on reputation, and he was never happy to let that go. _“Asking for Blonksy. He still around?”_

His Blonksy passport expires in nine months, Sebastian thinks. That’s enough to get him into most countries. “Yes.”

_“You available?”_

Sebastian has to choke back a dry, humourless laugh. “Yes,” he replies, rubbing his eyes. Rather permanently so.

He can’t say he’s interested. He’s thinking more favourably of hanging up and running as far and as fast as he can manage, but then Marie continues with _“Greller wants you on a target out in Porto Verde”_ , and something inside Sebastian’s mind comes alive.

 

 

 

And so Sebastian finds himself being rocked from side to side in a chopper powering its way from the Everglades down to South America, Jim’s laptop tucked away in the bag at his knee. He’s not worked recon in years, but now his body aches with the need for it – to be dropped into unfamiliar territory, to have his eyes and ears stripped away until he’s back working on cold, hard instinct. He stares down at the blurry, cropped image of Banner’s face, memorises it instantly.

“Is he a fighter?” Sebastian asks; the General gives him a long, hard look, but when he answers in the affirmative Sebastian is so very glad.

 

 

 

The General comes to trust him, which is his first mistake. He’s grooming him for something more; Sebastian can tell, and whilst Jim’s attention made him feel godlike he pities the base, greedy instinct always dwelling in the General’s eyes. He wants the perfect soldier, now Rogers is in the ice; and whilst Sebastian has no intention of working for this man in the long term for the meanwhile he is happy to comply.

“He thought he was working on radiation resistance,” the General continues, dropping into a chair, never one to be stopped in the middle of a lecture despite Sebastian’s bored, inattentive air. “I would never have told him what the project really was. But he was so sure of what he was on to that he tested it on himself, and something went very wrong. Or it went very right,” he adds, after a pause, and the glimmer of greed is back in the man’s eye, gaze unfocused and far away. “Far as I’m concerned that man’s whole body is property of the US army.”

“You said he wasn’t working on weapons, right?” Sebastian asks.

The General shakes his head. “No,” he agrees.

“But you were, weren’t you?” he continues, watching him with sharp eyes. “You were trying other things.”

The General nods, just slightly. “One serum we developed was very promising,” he assents, and a fierce, sharp want unfurls inside Sebastian’s chest.

“So why did he run?”

The General shrugs, climbs back out of his chair. “He’s a scientist. He’s not one of us,” he says, and Sebastian wants to smile at this small little man for daring to be as simple to separate scientist from soldier; he’s fought this Banner, and there is something of the fight in him yet. “Blonsky, how old are you? Forty-five?”

“Thirty-nine,” Sebastian replies, and not for the first time this week he feels every one of those long years.

The General raises his eyebrow. “It takes a toll, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” Sebastian replies, dryly. “It does.”

The General shrugs. “So, get out of the trenches. You should be a Colonel by now, with your record.”

Sebastian has to resist the urge to snort; he forgets sometimes how these throwaway aliases strip away from him everything he’s ever worked on. If anything he’s been a Colonel for too long; he’s dulled, blunted, a facsimile of the soldier, of the craftsman he used to be. “No, I’m a fighter. I’ll be one for as long as I can. Now, if I could take what I know now and put it into the body I had ten years ago, that would be someone I wouldn’t want to fight.” He thinks of himself, aged twenty-nine, stood in Jack Hawthorn’s workshop with his world tumbling down around him. He thinks he was pretty fucking naïve.

“I could probably arrange something like that,” the general replies.

 

 

 

The dimly-lit, high-walled corridors stretch farther than he’d imagined, this deep underground, and Sebastian has to kick back on instinct to retrace his steps with the General and find the doctor’s room in this labyrinthine tangle alone. A nurse gestures him into a side-room when he enters, tells him to undress, and when Sebastian steps back into the room with shirt removed the General is waiting for him.

“We’re giving you a very low dose only,” the General says, but Sebastian’s eyes are locked on the metal bed-like structure at his side; he absently thinks that there are a lot of straps. “We need you sharp out there, and disciplined. First sign of any side effect, we stop and you’re off-team until you straighten out. Agreed?”

Sebastian turns his attention to him. The General obviously doesn’t trust him as much as he had believed, and he almost scrapes some of his reputation back with that fact; but he’s still injecting practical perfection into the body of a man he doesn’t truly know, and that is idiocy itself. “Agreed.”

 

 

 

The changing rooms are empty, this time of night, the emergency teams already relegated to the choppers above; the centre is running on a skeleton crew, not left unguarded but distinctly less occupied nonetheless. Sebastian Moran stands in front of the worn, ugly mirror and stares into a stranger’s face, pale and drawn and old, and something seems to crawl along his spine and writhe under his skin.

When he joins the troopers in the choppers there is a dark, green blackness encroaching on the insides of his eyes. “How you feeling, man?” a soldier shouts to him, and Sebastian finds himself grinning from ear to ear.

“Like a monster,” Sebastian replies, and there is something of Jim in him when Sebastian smiles.

 

 

 

There is a small, sad little man on the barrel of Sebastian’s gun. He has followed Jim’s little trail of breadcrumbs, crossed oceans, fought monsters and become one himself, and inside this man’s mind is the simple string of words that will finally bring out from within him what he has always been.

“It’s not what you’ve done, it’s what you’re going to do,” Sebastian says, and each word is an effort to drag from the depths of his mind and spit out between his lips; he can feel his entire body shaking. He is so very tired. “I want what you got out of Banner. I want that.”

The scientist stands, and for a moment the General’s greed invades his eyes. “You look like you’ve got a little something in you already, don’t you?”

“I – ” His words are fogging in his mind; each breath is harder to pull. He feels so very far from perfection. “I want more. You’ve seen what he becomes, right?”

The scientist nods. “I have. And it’s beautiful. Godlike.”

“Well, I want that,” he replies, and his hands shake, his dimming eyes almost close. “Need that. Make me that,” he says, on the farthest edge of desperation.

The scientist complies.

 

*

 

The room is underground in a bunker made of concrete and of steel, and it is locked to all but the highest of clearance; but to the man with all the keys no room is truly barred. The small, unassuming figure weaves his nonchalant way through the winding, sharply-lit corridors, cold and rudely smelling enough of chlorine to make the backs of his eyes burn.

His target lies handcuffed to a hospital bed, alone and unconscious, body still covered with a thick sheen of sweat. Jim Moriarty runs his fingers along one arm, down one clammy, motionless cheekbone. He’s barely breathing. “Oh, my darling,” Jim says, and his voice is soft and truly forlorn. “What am I to do with you?”

 

 

 

The Abomination escapes from its cage. James Moriarty is never seen again.

 

 

 

They say that the Zanskar Mountains sometimes ring with an unearthly, inhuman roar, something akin to a tiger, something trapped between man and beast; and an odd, small man frequents the villages from time to time, with a quiet, frightening voice and black, pitiless eyes.


End file.
